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How to Write A Review

BY Garry Victor Hill

The Framework:

A review gives a reader information. The information should start with the title,

(which is in italics) then have the name of the creator. Identify what you are

reviewing; a book, film television show, concert, play, sporting event, newspaper

story, magazine or whatever. After this comes the extra information such as the

publisher, production studio or website identifying number. The date of creation

comes next. This is important as this determines if the reviewed thing is still in

print or on sale in shops. If the date given is old readers will know to shop online

or to try second hand shops or libraries. Include cost if known. After the date give

any other technical information that helps the reader. An illustration from the

reviewed thing is best as it helps the reader with identification and makes the

review look more vivid. End the framework information with your name. On the

next pages are three examples of how your framework information should look.

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The Water Diviner. Produced by Troy Lum, Andrew Mason and Keith

Rodger. Directed by Russell Crowe. Screenplay by Andrew Anastasios

and Andrew Knight. Based on the book by Sarah McGuire. Photography

by Andrew Lesnie. Music by David Hirshfelder.

Length: 111 minutes. A Hopscotch Feature. Warner Brothers/Universal

distribution. Cinematic Release December 2014. Rated R for violence

Rating ********* 90% Available on DVD. $28:50

CAST

Joshua Connor: Russell Crowe Ayshe: Olga Kurylenko Major Hasan: Yilmaz

Erdoğan Sergeant Jemal: Cem Yilmaz Orhan: Dylan Georgiades Lieutenant

Colonel Cyril Hughes: Jai Courtney Eliza Connor: Jaqueline McKenzie Arthur

Connor: Ryan Corr Henry Connor: Ben O’Toole Edward Connor: James Fraser

Fatma: Megan Gale Captain James Brindley: Daniel Wylie Father Macintyre:

Damon Herriman Omer: Steve Bastoni

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The Farmhouse Book by David Larkin

A Review by Garry Victor Hill

The Farmhouse Book: Tradition, Style and Experience.

An Illustrated Documentary by David Larkin

Photography by Carl Socolow, Michael Freeman, Paul Rocheleau, and Jessie

Walker

New York: Universe Publishing, 2005. Illustrated. 224 pages $35 (U.S.)

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Old Yellow Moon Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell

Produced by Brian Ahern for the Warner Music Company. 2013. CD. 41 minutes

12 songs. Rating: ********* 90% The cd comes with a twelve page booklet that

contains the complete lyrics, photographs and production information.

Introduce what the review is about.

This should be brief and the first aim must be to give readers some basic

information about what is being reviewed. i.e. “The McClymonts are three sisters

from Grafton who made an astounding debut a few years back.” The next section

should be a brief update for those who may know the basic information. i.e. “Now

they have issued their third album” In two short sentences you have introduced the

creators of what is being reviewed and the topic of your review. This is your

introduction, which in a review should not be long.

Say what You think

Your next sentences can either summarise what you think or start saying a bit

about what the reviewed object is about. Do not retell the story or say everything

that is in the original. Say enough and say it clearly, so that the reader will know

what the review is about and what you think. Do not go on at length in your

opinions. On the next page are some common mistakes made by reviewers:

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Adjective overload: i.e. (the words in italics) This is the most boring, stupid, silly,

cheap, worthless, crappy, ridiculous, time–wasting, trashy, badly-done thing ever

made.

Overstatement: (the words in italics) This is the most boring, stupid, silly, cheap,

worthless, crappy, ridiculous, time–wasting, trashy, badly-done thing ever made by

a major recording studio since history began

Overpraise: Michael Jackson was one of the world’s greatest geniuses as his last

album demonstrates to anybody who knows anything about his brilliant work.

Favours for Friends: Do not write reviews for friends. You could lose your friends

and your reputation for honesty. In a review you must criticise and if you give false

or overdone praise readers will not trust your opinions.

Ripping into rivals: Do not write reviews for people you know and dislike. This

also stands out and causes distrust and feuds that devour time and get nowhere.

Summary:

After saying what you think conclude the review with a one or two sentence

comment that sums up what you feel.

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An example of a book review is on the next page and a film review

follows.

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Red Nile: A Biography of the World’s Greatest River.

By Robert Twigger

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2013. Illustrated. 466 pages

Reviewed by Garry Victor Hill

A biography of a river seems an underused idea, but it also seems to be one full of

dangerous choices. Emphasis and interest can easily go astray. One obvious and

boring way to do this would be to put in book form something very similar to those

television documentaries where the voice of the narrator emerges as the only

human aspect. The voice explains landscapes, flora, fauna, climate, the effect of

seasons - in fact everything to do with science and geography, but nothing about

the river dwelling people. The other extreme would be to have the river gradually

develop into a backdrop setting for events involving ‘Famous People Who Have

Visited the Nile.’ This would be biography indeed, but celebrity biography in

disguise.

Fortunately Robert Twigger avoids both these extremes and keeps both a

sense of balance and of proportion. Chronologically and geographically the river’s

life began around twelve thousand years ago. Twigger continues the story up to the

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2011 Arab spring revolution, which he witnessed, vividly describes and astutely

analyses. That continuity makes for a panorama where he entwines the human

developments along the Nile’s banks with the changing geography of the river,

starting from its sources in central Africa to the Mediterranean delta.

Many maps of the Nile stop at Egypt’s borders and

few delineate the Blue Nile or show the Nile flowing out from different lakes in central East

Africa. In Red Nile Robert Twigger does deal with the question of where the Nile actually

starts.

He tells of the continuous interrelationship between river and people, from

the first tribal settlers to the latest attempts to use the Nile for irrigation and

damming. Several parts of the book are taken up with such attempts from the times

of the Pharaohs onwards: their effects were usually disappointing and sometimes

disastrous. The Aswan dam disaster remains only the most publicised amongst

these frequent failures.

Twigger writes of developments in this entwining process of people and

population in ways that are welcomingly unexpected. For example the word

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papyrus conjures up an image of the plant almost choking the Nile delta: the reality

was that the Nile papyrus was extinct in the 1950s and had to be reintroduced.

Another section deals with Egypt’s poisonous plants. We are told what they are,

and of their effects – and how they were used in politics to kill off rivals, from

ancient times onwards.

Twigger’s sense of proportion and balance also applies to what initially

seems an obviously easy question: where does the Nile actually start? He

concludes that the White Nile starts with the flow out from Lake Edward, but notes

that there are other small streams flowing into and out of that lake and other nearby

feeders interact with lakes, streams and rivers. There is no clear starting point

among the rainforest marshes.

His sense of proportion and balance also applies to time and to eras. The

Ancient Egyptians are dealt with, but they do not predominate. Life has indeed

gone on since Cleopatra died. In his An Egyptian Journal (1985) English novelist

William Golding made the point that Westerners see Egypt in terms of the empire

of the Pharaohs when they should be seeing it as being a modern Arab country.

Twigger does not make that mistake. Egypt has been a predominantly Moslem

country for nearly fourteen hundred years and he not only writes of his extensive

personal observations based in many years of living along the Nile, but he writes

with insight into both ethnic Arab history and the effects of Islamic rule. He

includes the well-known outsiders who became rulers of Egypt and lived lives out

of adventure novels: notably Saladin and Baiburs. The latter started out as a

bodyguard and ended up ruling an empire.. Egypt had a way of being ruled by

foreigners. Saladin was a Kurd from what is now Iraq, Barburs was a Kazakh from

the Crimea and after them Egypt was ruled by the Marmalukes for the Turkish

Ottomans, then the French and finally the British.

Twiggers also finds the less famous who should be famed. Less well known

than Saladin and Barburs but from the time of Medieval Arab rule are two of the

founders of modern medicine, the expatriate Spanish Jew Maimonides and Al-

Nafis. In one of his important but little known achievements (at least in the West)

Al-Nafis accurately and in detail wrote of how blood circulates four hundred years

before William Harvey did. Harvey got the credit, at least in the Western world.

Maimonides would work for Saladin in several fields. Today his reputation rests on

his writings as an innovative doctor and a man of medicine, as a theologian and a

philosopher.

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Another danger within Twigger’s topic concerns writing about the famous

and much written about English on the Nile. Doctor Livingston, Richard Burton

and Speke, General Gordon, Lord Wolseley, Lord Kitchener,... They have already

got massive literary coverage in such works as Winston Churchill’s The River War

(1899), Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile (1960) and The Blue Nile (1962) and

Michael Asher’s Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure (2005). Several

large sections in other works also cover these people and the events that they were

involved in. Such works include Fawn M. Brodie’s The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir

Richard Burton (1967), Brian Gardener’s Allenby (1965), Phillip Warner’s

Kitchener: the Man Behind the Legend (1985) and Thomas Parkenham’s The

Scramble For Africa 1876-1912. (1991). Howard Carter has probably had more

works and documentaries about his life than any of the others just mentioned. Two

underused aspects of the Westerners on the Nile concern touring writers Flaubert

and Agatha Christie, both get interesting and sometimes witty segments.

“Egypt is a nation five kilometres wide and two thousand kilometres long.” In

some parts it is not even that. Here a few metres from the Nile the desert starts.

Twigger does include these people and the events on the Nile that made them

important there, but does not allow his treatment of them to become a prolonged

retelling. He says little of the political turmoil that started in the 1920s and

continued into the 1950s. This conflict was between the various individuals

representing imperialists, nationalists and royalists who vied to control the Nile

and therefore Egypt. This convoluted, complicated and prolonged struggle

probably deserves another book as large as this one. As part of this development

Twigger includes a section on Sadat’s active youthful support for Hitler, an aspect

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of his career that deserves detail. A section on the architecturally magnificent

Shepheard’s Hotel, the most luxurious in the Middle East would have been good. It

was located on the Nile in Cairo and served as the heart of British Imperialism in

the Middle East. An Egyptian mob burnt it down during the independence

Revolution of 1952.

The last sections of his book are pensive as he writes of the ecological,

demographic, financial and social pressures that Mubarak could not contain and so

they lead to Egypt’s Arab spring. Twigger does not give easy answers and there

seems to be none. The Nile however, despite ecological poison, despite damming

and population pressures will continue to flow – but through what?

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The Water Diviner Reviewed by Garry Hill

The Water Diviner. Produced by Troy Lum, Andrew Mason and Keith

Rodger. Directed by Russell Crowe. Screenplay by Andrew Anastasios

and Andrew Knight. Based on the book by Sarah McGuire. Photography

by Andrew Lesnie. Music by David Hirshfelder.

Length: 111 minutes. A Hopscotch Feature. Warner Brothers/Universal

distribution. Cinematic Release December 2014. Rated R for violence

Rating ********* 90% Available on DVD.

CAST

Joshua Connor: Russell Crowe Ayshe: Olga Kurylenko Major Hasan: Yilmaz

Erdoğan Sergeant Jemal: Cem Yilmaz Orhan: Dylan Georgiades Lieutenant

Colonel Cyril Hughes: Jai Courtney Eliza Connor: Jaqueline McKenzie Arthur

Connor: Ryan Corr Henry Connor: Ben O’Toole Edward Connor: James Fraser

Fatma: Megan Gale Captain James Brindley: Daniel Wylie Father Macintyre:

Damon Herriman Omer: Steve Bastoni

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From the first scenes this emerges as a welcomingly different film. Lines of tired,

pensive Turkish soldiers, clothed in motley, ragged uniforms, prepare to charge the

enemy trenches. The stereotypical images of Middle Eastern soldiers, all glinting

eyes as they cheerfully leap forward to kill, does not exist here: they are just weary

and fearful men defending their homeland. When they do charge the trenches they

are at first puzzled as the trenches are empty: then to their initial credulity they see

the Allied ships sailing off. As they run up the rise the images of dirty, muddy

trenches give way to a bright blue sea under a cloudless sky. Laughter and cheers

replace their sadness. After living in a state of extaordinary tension and miserable

expectations of death and more suffering, they find that life can also give

exuberant joy. That idea emerges again in the film’s conclusion.

After those scenes the next, set four years later, is as far away from Gallipoli

as anyone can get – the Mallee country of Northwest Victoria. Here the process

reverses. Joshua Connor, a farmer and water diviner, goes into a jubilant state

when he finds water on his land, but returns home to being depressed as his wife

can only be happy when she sinks into a fantasy that their three sons are still alive.

All three were killed in one day at Gallipoli. There cannot be any peace on the

Connor’s farm. After his wife drowns herself, he determines to keep his promise to

her and see that they get a proper burial, so he journeys to Gallipoli.

He finds that an absence of war is far fom being the same thing as peace, for

as a supercilious and cynical British officer explains to him, the defeated Ottoman

Empire is being carved up by the victors, England, France and Greece. He also

explains to Connor that resentful Turks are causing problems. For some reason

they do not like that process or the occupying English army in Istanbul. Connor

soon shares that dislike as the officious English try to stop him visiting Gallipoli

where their War Graves Commision work to identify and rebury the dead. That is

part of bringing order to war’s chaos. Both Turkish and British soldiers now work

together to tidy up the battlefield they once ferociously fought over. Initially seen

as a pest by the soldiers there, both Allied and Turkish come to respect Connor and

help him with his task.

He soon finds himself embroiled in four different poroblems at once; his

personal battle with English officialdom worsens, as does the worsening political

situation. Then the attraction between himself and his hotel owner Ayshe, under

familial and religious compulsion to marry someone else, leads him and her into

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tensions with her relatives. Finally he finds that just burying his sons is not enough:

he must resolve the mystery of what did happen to them.

The Water Diviner is a well crafted film with locales and sets that make for

an intelligent use of epic and a fine sense of era. Andrew Lesnie’s photography is

extraordinarily effective, often beautiful, at times even sensual, giving a strong

sense of sun drenched lands. LIke many other very experienced stars making their

directorial debut, Crowe has a strong sense of narrative and knows how to use his

cast. He also knows how to avoid stereotypes. The British officers are not hearty

stupid types, but cranky tired men wanting to be home. The Turks are not ferocious

warriors, but generous, courteous and courageous. Aysha is no subservient widow,

but fights for her rights.

This photographic still gives an accurate idea of the high quality of the film’s

photography

The story is well told and Crowe wisely goes for an underused era and

locale. The only other major English language films to cover the same territory

that comes to mind are Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) and the 1970 Tony Curtis-

Charles Bronson adventure You Can’t Win em All. That film was set in 1922

towards the end of the Geek-Turkish war. Only in the last quarter when Connor

goes eastwards by train into the war zone does Crowe’s movie begin to resemble

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the earlier action movie as the war between Greece an Turkey finally breaks out. A

similar idea to that which is the focus of The Water Diviner was used in the 1982

Costa-Gavras film Missing. Ed Horman, an American, arrives in Chile searching

for his missing son, but Chile is turbulent after the 1973 coup, and like Connor he

soon finds that a repressive military government combines with the officials he

expects help from to thwart his attempts. Both Connor and Horman are couteous,

patient and restrained and possess a fundamental decency. With both men these

characteristics conceal a quiet but relentless determination to find their sons.

The Water Diviner differs from both Gallipoli and Missing however in its

view of humanity. Peter Weir’s film shows good men being devoured by war and

as being helpless to stop that process. In Costa-Gavras’s film we are shown how

low humans can go with the establishment of a fascist dictatorship which only a

few decent people unsucessfully battle. In The Water Diviner Connor wins against

the effects of war.

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